Sunday, January 12, 2014

An old man in a hurry to revitalise his church (Opinion)

In the less than a year since he ascended the throne of Saint Peter, Pope Francis
has hit the Church of Rome like an embracing whirlwind, prompting
Catholics to smile again and putting a new spring in their step.

Demoralised by the cascade of scandals unveiling priests who sexually
abused children, and too often dismayed by the pinched and defensive
dogma of his predecessors Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Catholics
have a lot to celebrate this Christmas.

Profane niggles that the new
Pope, beaming and big-hearted, is more about style than substance are
unlikely to inhibit them. For, as the Gospel proclaimed, in the
beginning was the Word. And the word about this Pope is out.Pope Francis was this month named Time magazine’s person of the year.
He also made the cover of the New Yorker magazine, depicted as a
smiling angel, whether ascending or descending is not clear (a Sunni
Muslim leader who saw him recently described him as “so down to earth”).

His following on social media is vast, while people who have crowded to
see him in person, from St Peter’s Square to Copacabana beach, number
in the multimillions. The pews of Catholic churches across Europe and
the US are filling up again, rallying to a pope who disdains the pomp of
his office and drives a clapped-out Renault 4. In early December, he
celebrated his 77th birthday over breakfast with four homeless men and a
dog.

One
of the extraordinary features of this pope – Jorge Mario Bergoglio,
until this year a little-known Argentine Jesuit prelate – is his way
with words, which seem to cast Church orthodoxy in a new light without necessarily changing it. His first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium
(“The Joy of the Gospel”), puts every emphasis on the joy he radiates.

“An evangeliser must never look like someone who has just come back from
a funeral,” he says.

The straightforward way Francis speaks,
for those inured to the hectoring of recent decades, is arresting – an
idiom that echoes the Second Vatican Council convened by Pope John XXIII
in 1962, which tried to bring the two millennia-old Church into less
abrasive alignment with its modern flock.

Following another half century
of papal intolerance intended to smother debate, Francis told a Jesuit
magazine in September the Church had to find a “new balance” or collapse
“like a house of cards”.

He has made ostentatiously humble remarks about gays. (“Who am I to
judge?”) He has upset traditionalists by intimating atheists could get
to heaven. “God’s mercy has no limits,” he said. Francis was retrieving
Vatican II, which in 1964 revised Church doctrine that there was no
salvation outside its fold.

Yet this was not just an inclusive sentiment
but a calculated attempt to occupy the “God-shaped void”, as the
17th-Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal called it, that many believers
sense replaces belief. “I have a dogmatic certainty,” Pope Francis said
later, with a twinkle of irony, that “God is in every person’s life.”

He is less playful talking about the Church, likening it to a “field
hospital after a battle”, where the doctors obsess about cholesterol
levels. “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay
marriage and the use of contraceptive measures.”

Calling for a
missionary Church of the poor, he told bishops to be shepherds who
“smell more like the sheep”, likening their jostling for position and
attachment to the trappings of office to “spiritual adultery”. He
prefers a Church that is “bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been
out on the streets”.

The Pope’s ostensible relaxation of old anathemas should probably be
seen mainly as a reordering of the Church’s priorities. Core doctrine is
most unlikely to change.

But the theology that interprets Catholic
teaching may well become more dynamic, as Francis clearly intends to
change the structures that seek to implement it.

Pietro Parolin, his new
secretary of state, has for instance pointed out that enforced celibacy
for Catholic priests is a tradition – not a doctrine – which has
already been chipped away by the embrace of married Anglican converts
and followers of eastern rites with allegiance to Rome such as the
Maronites of the Levant, as well as some American priests who choose
simply to ignore it.

There is steely pragmatism alongside Francis’s piety. It is hard to
see, for example, how a Church so devastated by revelations of child
rape could credibly keep sexual mores and personal morality at the
pinnacle of its concerns.

But while the Pope has moved fast and with flair,
traditionalist hierarchs and the most reactionary elements of the
Vatican Curia will surely regroup. His aim is not just to reform the
bureaucracy and its institutions, such as a Vatican bank
suspected of money-laundering, but a radical decentralisation of Church
governance that would make him the last pope to wield absolute
ecclesiastical power – if it works.

It is still early days. Demonstrable deeds are few. To take the most
obvious example, the insolence of those clerics who tried to paint
investigation of child abuse as a conspiracy against the Church has yet
to be answered publicly.

By contrast, the questionnaire on sex-related
issues Francis has distributed worldwide surely suggests its questions –
abortion clearly not one of them – are open. Yet Catholics remember the
disappointment 50 years ago when Pope Paul VI ruled against artificial
contraception, in what Cardinal Leo Jozef Suenens called “another
Galileo affair”.

But Francis’s denunciation of what he calls a “crude and naive trust”
in the free market, along with what he regards as baseless
“trickle-down theories” that rob humanity of solidarity, is at the heart
of Evangelii Gaudium and gets daily more full-throated.

“The
worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless
guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal
economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting
finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their
lack of real concern for human beings.”

Orthodox economists are realising this is a view likely to resonate
far more influentially than, say, the Occupy movement or the indignados.

An old man in a hurry who calls Dostoyevsky his “life mentor” is not lightly to be disdained.